Heart attacks growing more common among people in their 20s and 30s

The proportion of heart attack patients who are 40 or younger has steadily increased over the last decade, according to research set to be presented March 17 at the American College of Cardiology’s scientific sessions in New Orleans.

Senior author Ron Blankstein, MD, and colleagues studied 2,097 patients age 50 or younger who were admitted to two large hospitals for myocardial infarction (MI) from 2000 to 2016. One-fifth of those patients were 40 or younger, and the proportion of those very young heart attack sufferers increased by 2 percent annually over the final 10 years of the study, according to an ACC press release.

“It used to be incredibly rare to see anyone under age 40 come in with a heart attack—and some of these people are now in their 20s and early 30s,” Blankstein, a preventive cardiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and associate professor at Harvard Medical School, said in the release. “Based on what we are seeing, it seems that we are moving in the wrong direction.”